


Caught

by theLiterator



Category: Under the Red Hood
Genre: Angst, Awkward Conversations, Coda, Gen, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 13:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20436776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: He was breaking some sort of unspoken truce, being here, Dick knew. It wasn’t reallyhistruce, so he shouldn’t be worried about it, but there was a great big part of him that felt like truces Bruce set in stone were inviolable by him. By any of them.Post UTRH movie, Dick finds Jason.





	Caught

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pentapus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/gifts).

> I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to write entirely, but this hit me in the brain and Penta said I should post it. Thanks to her for all of her support and persistent friendship, as always.

He was breaking some sort of unspoken truce, being here, Dick knew. It wasn’t really _his_ truce, so he shouldn’t be worried about it, but there was a great big part of him that felt like truces Bruce set in stone were inviolable by him. By any of them.

The drafty apartment building in the middle of the Red Hood’s territory was old and decaying, Gotham to its very bones, and Dick felt simultaneously totally at home there and like an interloper.

That was Gotham.

_That_ was encroaching on another Robin’s territory, really, and he almost turned back. There was a little Turkish restaurant in an equally ramshackle building just up the block and that would make a decent excuse for why he--

“Aren’t you going to come up?” Jason’s voice was husky, and maybe a little mocking, and Dick turned to him with a smile that he wasn’t sure he should feel.

“I didn’t know if I was invited.”

Jason smirked at him, raised an eyebrow. “And when has a little thing like a lack of invitation ever stopped you before?”

Dick raised an eyebrow. He never knew what the hell game Jason was playing at, and if he were willing to be honest with himself, he might admit that was part of why he kept nearly breaking that unspoken truce.

“Sometimes,” he replied. “Mostly on Tuesdays.”

“Today’s Sunday,” Jason replied, shifting slightly. He was always in a fighting stance, when Dick saw him, on some sort of edge that Dick couldn’t see. He’d spent weeks thinking it was just him, just _them_, but Bruce insisted it was some sort of madness that was now endemic to Jason.

Dick wasn’t sure he believed that, and besides, he knew how to de-escalate a Situation, even if he never understood why chance (deliberate, this one was deliberate, there was no hiding that) meetings constituted a Situation in Jason’s eyes.

He leaned back a little and held his hands out from his body slightly, palms flat, fingers relaxed. He hadn’t lost his smile, because of course he hadn’t, but he made sure it was soft, with his teeth covered by his lips and his eyes doing most of the work.

Jason’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “What the hell.”

Dick shrugged.

“Bruce send you here to play me?”

“No,” Dick said, snorting a little. “He doesn’t tell me what to do.”

It was Jason’s turn to snort. He took a half step closer to Dick, and his hand curled around Dick’s arm, just above the elbow.

If they’d been in a different sort of city, someone might have noticed that the grip wasn’t exactly friendly, but the passers-by continued to studiously ignore them.

“Aren’t you going to come up?” Jason repeated, and Dick leaned into the touch like it was friendly.

“Sure thing,” he said. “Like I said, just wondering if I was invited.

The expression on Jason’s face was priceless.

Jason held out til the elevator, which was actually a lot more self-restraint than Dick’d been expecting. Jason had been at the periphery of their little corner of vigilantism for a few months, and he wasn’t exactly keen on demonstrating self-restraint in how he did things.

Except, Dick realized with a shudder as the elevator doors closed, except _what if he was_.

“What does _he_ want?” Jason asked, and when Dick turned to look at him, his face was shadowed and his gaze was in the middle distance.

“Bruce didn’t send me.”

Jason slammed a fist into the elevator wall. It dented, slightly, a little mark to match a half dozen others on the walls already.

“Liar,” he snarled, still not looking at Dick, not exactly.

“Believe it or not, but I’m not exactly known for taking his orders, am I?”

Jason didn’t say anything for a long moment. The elevator crept upwards at a snail’s pace. Probably needed repair, Dick thought idly. He wondered what that would cost, wondered how much Jason would murder him if he looked into it.

Probably a lot.

“I think that’s my schtick, now,” Jason said finally.

Dick smiled up at him, and the lights flickered in the elevator as it shuddered to a stop on the top floor.

The lock on his apartment door made an awful metallic crunching noise when Jason turned his key, and… well. Dick had lived in worse conditions, but not normally by choice.

He looked around, realizing that he was having a hard time assessing the apartment objectively around the time he saw that Jason’s computer was literally set up on the floor, and then turned back to Jason who was grimacing at him in a sort of unpracticed way.

“Welcome to Chateau d’Jason,” he said. “Want some tea?”

“Sure,” Dick said.

“You can have the chair,” Jason added, gesturing at it. It was a sad sort of thing, with the stuffing poking through worn out upholstery in several places.

_Come home,_ Dick almost said, catching himself only because he of all of them could understand why the Manor wasn’t always home.

Maybe he was the only one who could understand Jason. Maybe that’s why he’d looked at the beautiful Sunday afternoon and decided to come here.

A snap heralded the water being put to boil, and Dick looked up to Jason fussing with what had to be a samovar. The realization burned through him, all at once, that probably no one could understand Jason.

He’d been _dead_.

Dick sucked in a breath, and his head was suddenly spinning, his vision getting fuzzy all over. It felt really stupid, the distant part of him that wasn’t suddenly on the verge of a panic attack observed.

He’d known Jason was alive for _months_ now. Why now?

Time spun away from him, and then there was a hot mug in his hands and Jason hovering just in front of his face, the anger smoothed away by concern. “You’re safe here, Dick,” he said.

“Yeah, well, last time one of us was in your apartment you blew it up,” Dick said, but it sounded whiny and breathless and not irritated like he’d intended.

Jason’s hands closed around his. The right one was a mess of scars, and Dick wanted to pretend he didn’t know where they had come from, but he could hear Bruce’s dispassionate voice, reporting to Alfred._I threw the batarang. He fired anyway. The gun exploded._

“Yeah, in my defense, I was trying to blow up someone else.”

Dick stared at him. “It was a really solid plan,” he managed to say. “I was very impressed.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “I learned from the best. Should have known though. That it would never work out how I wanted.”

Dick looked down and blew on the steam. Jason’s hands stayed curled around his.

“I could have told you that it wouldn’t work. I would have helped, you know.”

“See, that’s the problem. I literally can’t imagine why you would.”

I would though, Dick wanted to protest.

“I mean, you coming here, you following me at night, I believe you now. I wouldn’t have believed you six months ago, but--”

He interrupted himself when Dick carefully took a sip, shaking his head. “-- see, that? I believe you now.”

“It’s just tea,” Dick said.

“And I’m just a murderer,” Jason replied.

Dick shrugged.

That mattered, he knew. Or it was supposed to. “You know, I’ve gone through the same shit.”

Jason laughed, and it echoed a little eerily in the mostly-empty apartment.

Dick rolled his eyes. “I meant hating Bruce, not… You know what, stop that, you look like an idiot.”

“Better than being one,” Jason replied, and Dick laughed too, shaky from the panic attack, but still a laugh.

That was good, Dick thought. He’d had a hard time laughing lately.

“Tea’s good,” Dick said. “I like it.”

“You didn’t come for tea,” Jason said, suddenly sober.

“I don’t know,” Dick said, taking a last sip to finish off the cup. “Maybe I did?”

Jason grunted, but he didn’t seem nearly so ready to fight as he had been, and maybe the unspoken truce Jason had going with Bruce really didn’t apply to Dick after all.


End file.
